Based on your comment that the mashable.com menu is what you are going for, I’ll be assuming that you want to structure your HTML similar to that (which is to say ul.menu > li > a + ul.submenu + ul.featured-content). That said, that’s really implementation details which you can refine for your use case. Before … Read more
I would suggest looking at using transients for your data. Using transients would also take care of needing to use cron to update the data. Transients are an under utilised function of WordPress and can save considerable loads on resources as sites get busier. Vee
I’m not sure I fully understand what you’re trying to achieve, but I’d suggested to attempt to construct the field’s ID and name from data you’ve got available from the source code of the generated widget. If you check out the code, you’ll find that by every widget, there’s a hidden form field called id_base … Read more
twitter widget loads properly in all themes except my own theme?
How can I build a widget area widget using the built in WordPress functionalities?
How know the “admin” blog from wordpress multisite?
I just understood what happened: The custom widgets were using short tags (<?) to split up the HTML output, which directive (short_open_tag) is disabled by default in the production environment. Problems like this are a pain to spot and I can do nothing but laughing thinking what we tried to understand the issue.
This needs to be implemented at the widget code level for which the code in the question you start with is not a good match. The easiest way might be to decouple the widget content editing and the widget placement. You can set up a specific page in which it is possible to manage the … Read more
This is more of a pure PHP than WordPress. You are implicitly creating $ranNum as local variable in function scope. $Example_Widget won’t access widget instance in PHP. What you should be using is $this->ranNum, for reading and writing. That will create object’s property implicitly, but you likely should declare it explicitly in your class definition … Read more
If your theme is any good, no code at all will be rendered for empty widget areas, so if you want them all to show, you must populate them. There are off course browser tools that will highlight widget areas, but they will only show one at a time, while you presumably want an overview … Read more